Fried chicken, that is.
Category: Chicken
For some reason, I had a hankering for some wings today, so on my way back from the ceramics studio I stopped to pick up some decent-quality wings, along with celery (I potted and brought in a garden plant of cutting celery as an herb, but needed fat stalks) and some good local blue cheese. Now it’s worth saying that I’ve never made wings in the classic manner before, but it didn’t seem to be too hard. And since I’d gone all day without sitting in front of this damned appliance, I wasn’t about to break that streak by looking up recipes or anything dumb like that. I just got started. And the result? Pretty fantastic.
Usually when I see the end product in my mind before I begin to cook it turns out pretty well. I don’t know why this is, but I’ve learned to trust it; when I want to make a particular thing–even if I’ve never made it before–I do my best to make it. It almost always works.
I have been extraordinarily busy of late, with a show opening next week and an article due before I go to hang it and then swan around the opening looking artistic and important and the like. And this on top of the usual day-to-day, which seems only to get thicker and more obnoxious with the passage of time. The to-do list is metastasizing into a beast that will not be tamed. Anyone looking for an internship as my personal assistant is encouraged to apply; it may not be the sexiest position available but I promise that at least half of the things I throw at you will be good to eat.
There are worse things in the world than roasting a chicken once a week. Of course given my lack of organization and general allergy to schedules, it never works out to be a regular, say, Sunday night thing for us. But we do it often enough, and now that it’s warm the grill can step in to replace the oven. Whichever method you use, it is vitally important to save all the bones, even if you have guests; if they think it’s weird, tell them to get over it. You boil them again, so what’s the problem? Throwing bones away before using them for stock is a crime, plain and simple.
Lately there are lots of meals for which I don’t open wine–it’s expensive to drink all the time and takes a toll physically–but for a roast chicken I almost always pop a friendly, mid-weight red–lately Borgueuils and Chinons have been really doing it for me, but with a few more degrees on the thermometer, this is a meal designed for rosé. Speaking of which, it’s back to utterly gorgeous outside (I’m drinking rosé now) but we went through a pretty chilly spell a few days ago. In response (and lately I’ve been thinking about how much the weather influences my cooking every day), I made sort of summer picnic food but with all of the cold-weather comfort quotient we needed on the evening in question.
Chicken thighs kind of make me sad. Whole legs, I love; they’re big, and classically proportioned, and can be arranged all artfully akimbo on a plate, but thighs by themselves just sort of shrink into unappealing little lumps that are very hard to make beautiful without shredding all of the meat off to make something entirely other. And that has often been a problem, since the closest store only carries (organic, semi-local) thighs. Until now. Today I figured out that if I just treat them like wings, they work just fine; subsumed in sauce they become part of a whole, rather than the featured protein. So this evening, presented with two frozen four-packs of said thighs, I attempted to combine my parallel desires for hot wings and escabeche into one low monthly payment.
To begin, I rolled the thighs in seasoned flour. Not doing this means that the skin pretty much entirely gets stuck to the pan (we are a Teflon™-free household) and further ruins what little aesthetic charm the meat possesses to begin with. I added salt, pepper, herbs, cumin, and smoked paprika to the flour. After they were a goodly brown all over, I added a head’s worth of cauliflower florets to brown as well, and a bit more flour to roux-ify the oil in the skillet. Then I poured in a mixture of tomato paste, sherry, pork stock, balsamic, sherry, and cider vinegars along with a handful of minced garlic and herbs, covered the pan, and let it all simmer low for a while.
This here salad is made entirely from things that survived the winter and are now roaring back. Some stuff–I’m talking to you, Asian cabbage–is just bolting and bitter, but the mizuna, pan di zucchero, and radicchio are lovely. There’s a bit of chervil, too, and parsley, and I cut all the tatsoi too since it was thinking about flowering. Now I love a good bowl of greens; there’s nothing quite so soul-polishing as a perfect…
On my way back from Newark airport after dropping the family off, I accidentally bought this beautiful Le Creuset dish. Then, once the kitchen was functional and said family had been fetched and reinstalled here at home, it sort of seemed important that I take it for a spin on our new 101,000 BTU stove (not counting the oven, of course). I dusted chicken legs with a mixture of flour, salt, and spices (all in…
After a week of epic frustration, it’s been pure luxury to have a day off, reveling in the clarity, aroma, and Proustian recall of early fall. I dug a good variety of the annual herbs, potting and soaking them well in advance of their imminent repair to the dining room where they’ll sit basking in the waning sun shining through the big windows. The only hitch is that the radiator under the windows dries them…
Every Wednesday we have the Farmers’ Market in town, and it’s one of the best things to happen here in a while (this is the second year). There’s music, and a flea market in the adjacent field, and prepared food as well as the usual produce, cheese, bread, meat, and wine. There are cooking classes for kids, and the weather has actually been pretty good on most of the recent days. It’s always fun to…